“A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.” That is Dr. Anthony Fauci’s description of Dr. Anthony Fauci, from a June interview. “Because all of the things that I have spoken about, consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. [I]f you are trying to, you know, get at me as a public health official and a scientist, you’re really attacking not only Dr. Anthony Fauci, you’re attacking science.”

Anthony Fauci is a graduate of a private Manhattan school where he was the varsity basketball captain, an alumnus of the College of the Holy Cross, and a doctor of Cornell University Medical College. He has received 50 honorary doctorates from universities in the United States and other countries. According to a government website, he is the 132nd most-cited author of 992,000 authors in general and internal medicine, the 32nd most-cited living researcher, the 20th most-cited author of 2.4 million in the field of research and experimental medicine, the 9th most-cited author out of 2.5 million other immunologists, a presenter of major lectures around the globe, and a recipient of the National Medal of Science, the George M. Kober Medal, the Mary Woodard Lasker Award, the Albany Medical Center Prize, the Robert Koch Gold Medal, the Prince Mahidol Award, the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor awarded by the United States government. He is also the highest paid of all 2 million-plus employees in that government.

By all these measures of success, Dr. Anthony Fauci is a success! This is why he has come to the forefront of the U.S. government in its response to the covid-19 outbreak. And, apparently, this is why he equates the field of scientific study to himself.

Yet well-paid, award-winning, extensively cited, doctor-times-50 Anthony Fauci is also the man who initially helped fund the lab where covid-19 likely originated, then opposed the lab leak theory; who initially said the outbreak would likely remain minor, then promoted “15 days to slow the spread,” and later advocated unprecedented lockdowns for more than a year. He is the man who initially advised that masks were unnecessary, then claimed that he had been misleading people so that they would leave enough masks for health-care workers, and still later said that double mask effectiveness was “common sense.” He is the man now telling the world that he has spoken “consistently from the very beginning” and has, at the same time, “evolved” his advice.

There is something advanced—yet wrong—about Dr. Anthony Fauci. And there is something advanced—yet wrong—about the people we call scientists.

Some people advance through the educational, medical, political or other systems of our societies and become what we consider elite, wise, high-minded. Yet this does not immunize them from being evil, from being wrong or even from being fools!

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22). Look at the elites in the news today. Do you see this verse proven true? The Bible describes the society that would exist “in the last days,” and says that among those who are “lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers” and even “traitors,” there are those who are “highminded” (2 Timothy 3:1-4). These verses apply to the “perilous times” of our generation!

And here is a verse that really stands out. God inspired the Apostle Paul to write this to his assistant in 1 Timothy 6:20-21: “O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.”

Science falsely so called!

The New King James Version translates this verse: “O Timothy! Guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.”

The Greek word for “science” in this verse is gnōsis, which means knowledge. True science is true knowledge. Our Creator created us to receive true education, engage in true scientific study, and acquire true knowledge about the creation around us.

But there is such a thing as science falsely so called. In fact, science falsely so called completely dominates our society.

In these “last days” of human civilization, almost all so-called scientists are deeply steeped in the hypothesis of evolution. They don’t just reject revelation from God and God’s Word, they now reject the very existence of God! With high-minded aggression, they scorn the idea that creation came from a Creator, and they especially loathe the biblical description of Him.

This is unscientific! Modern scientists, so-called, assume the nonexistence of the Creator and the absolute fact of godless evolution. Yet they do not support that theory with any of the scientific proof that they insist on in all other scientific inquiry! These are contradictions against their own standards and against the foundation for true science. Their entire premise is wrong!

This is why science and academia are so much more prone to, as the New Living Translation renders it, “godless, foolish discussions.” Scientists and other experts have knowledge, but it is false knowledge. Many people have memorized and figured out huge sums of knowledge in conflict with other huge sums of knowledge. We are floating in floods of information that is just not true.

It’s a paradox, as Herbert W. Armstrong put it. It’s truth mixed with error, good mixed with evil. Its very foundation is human rejection of God’s revelation. And, as we are proving here in the Information Age, without God’s revelation and law as your foundation, you cannot understand anything of substance!

The Creator reveals what human beings are, what our purpose is, and what we should do with our lives. Any “expert” knowledge that is not based on that or even aware of it amounts to vain babbling.

“If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness; He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings” (verses 3-4).

Those who reject God’s truth are, as the Moffatt translation renders it, conceited, ignorant and passionate for controversy and argument, which leads only to envy, dissension, insults and insinuations.

“Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself” (verse 5).

The governing elites during Jesus Christ’s day were full of knowledge, highly acclaimed, wealthy and powerful. They even believed in God and devoted much of their lives to their religion. They excelled within that system. They gained status and respect and much more. They and others supposed that it was godliness. Yet when they encountered knowledge from the very Son of God, they wanted to destroy it and destroy Him! They were not “Satan worshipers,” as we usually think of the term, yet Jesus told them to their faces, “Ye are of your father the devil …. He … abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him …” (John 8:44). The devil doesn’t just inspire “satanic” people, he influences everyone (see 2 Corinthinas 4:4 and Revelation 12:9).

In Mark 7:7-9, Christ said, “Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. For laying aside the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men …. And he said unto them, Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.”

The elite Jews of His day, as religious as they were, would not give up their own intellectual vanity! This is why He gave this shocking warning to them in Matthew 11:24: “[I]t shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee.” My father quoted this remarkable passage in “The Fatal Flaw in Modern Science,” and wrote, “Intellectual vanity is more dangerous than the grotesque sexual sins of Sodom!” In verse 25, Jesus thanked God the Father for hiding the truth from the elites and revealing it to the lowly.

If you have excelled in the tradition of men, if you hold 50 honorary degrees, it is easy for you to take for granted that you are godly. That is how you can say to the world I am science! I am the truth! while you deceive people and are ignorant of the truth yourself.

This is deeply ingrained in human nature. Paul encountered it in Athens among the intellectual elites of Greece: “[A]ll the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing” (Acts 17:21). Like Plato, these thinkers devoted their lives to gaining new knowledge. They were amazed by the human mind, but they worshiped it as a god rather than worshiping God and building God’s character. As Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in “The Modern Athenians in Today’s Universities,” our educational system worships the human mind!

Our system of education is a result of this belief! That is why it has produced amazing advancements—and egregious evils!

How deep does this fatal flaw go?

Genesis 3 records Satan the devil subtly reasoning with the first woman. The ultimate choice Adam and Eve had to make was this: Whom would they believe? God gave them the choice to believe Him and obey Him. Satan gave them the choice to reject God, promising, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (verse 5).

That is an appeal to the human mind and intellect. It is an appeal to disbelieve and disobey the God who created that mind and intellect. It is an appeal to decide good and evil for yourself, to experiment as you see fit, to set your own boundaries.

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (verse 6).

“They pioneered in deciding for themselves what is right and what is wrong—what is righteousness and what is sin!” Mr. Armstrong wrote in The Missing Dimension in Sex. “And humanity has been doing what seems right in its own eyes ever since. And how did they do it? They 1) rejected revelation, 2) used observation, 3) used experimentation and 4) used human reason. And that is precisely the ‘scientific’ method used by modern science today!”

The false “scientific method” started with the very first human beings! They rejected revelation from God, relied on their own five senses and human minds, and have continued to build an increasingly unstable civilization right up to today. Look around: The insanity we are seeing is all the result of our human system of education!

Our modern system of education is based on knowledge and science falsely so called. It worships it as if it were a messiah!

What a powerful insight the Bible gives!

“Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

Philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but this field is just as flawed and self-contradictory as science and education. Why? Because it’s based on the wisdom of this world!

“For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness” (1 Corinthians 3:19).

This high-minded wisdom is so tempting and addictive that even those who learn the revelation and truth of God often turn back to it. Several prophecies show that this would happen in our generation. Malachi 2:12 says that God cuts off “the master and the scholar” from Himself, and 2 Thessalonians 2:11 says that because these people had the truth but did not love it, God Himself would “send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie.” They forsook the truth of God for “philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men”! God is not the only spirit being out there. The same spirit being that gave Adam and Eve false education is still beguiling people today. That is why our society is the way it is!

“Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he [hath seen], vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind” (Colossians 2:18). This verse shows how subtle and powerful the deception can be. People can be delighting in humility and be worshiping an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14), but their intellectual vanity has caused them to betray the trust of God and the true knowledge He has given them! As Mr. Armstrong wrote when a group of Bible scholars in the Church tried to use a systemic, academic method to revise its doctrines, “God has not chosen the scholarly to receive, comprehend, understand and reveal to His Church His true doctrines and customs. Some have not realized that fact. … God is emphatically not opposed to knowledge and understanding. But modern ‘scholarship’ speaks a language all its own. … It is not only a manner of speaking and writing. It is a way of thinking—an attitude. And I will say bluntly it is injected by Satan. It is a form of intellectual vanity! … [O]nce a ‘scholar’ he will seldom change his mind. He is right—he knows he is right—others are wrong—his intellectual vanity will not let him admit error.”

This attitude is so strong that it affected God’s own Church. “For although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened” (Romans 1:21; Revised Standard Version). Human beings can muster huge amounts of thinking, yet without repenting humbly toward God, we worship the self and consider the self the final authority. All that thinking becomes futile and empty. Yet what bubbles to the surface is pride—pride in our trifling accomplishments. Our carnal human minds naturally resist believing, honoring and obeying God. Verse 22 states: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

“He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered” (Proverbs 28:26).

“Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!” (Isaiah 5:21).

Scholars in science and other fields pride themselves on pursuing knowledge, yet it’s always the pride that bubbles to the surface. Intellectual vanity breeds this and other evils. We saw it when our Church fought in court for the right to publish Mystery of the Ages. That book explains the main themes of the Bible itself. Yet intellectuals in God’s own Church tried to subvert those truths in the 1970s, then again after Mr. Armstrong died in 1986. They took that book, which summarizes all those doctrines and the Bible itself, out of print and sued us to stop us from printing it and giving it away free!

When we faced them in court, these people, who once claimed to believe and live by what the Bible said and Mystery of the Ages explained, displayed masterful obfuscation and deceit! Their pride pushed aside and attacked the truth of God! We fought in court for that book for six years. (I urge you to request your own free copy of Mystery of the Ages, by Herbert W. Armstrong. Compare it to the Bible for yourself, prove it, love it and never let it go!)

“Let no man deceive himself. If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. And again, The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain. Therefore let no man glory in men …” (1 Corinthians 3:18-21). God snares the elite of this world in their own high-minded wisdom so called!

An honest mind that is free from Satan’s self-glorifying influence recognizes the obvious, inescapable truth that we come from a Creator, and that all good things come from Him! (James 1:17). This is why being smart and being good are two different things. Many very intelligent people have done very evil things!

“Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought” (1 Corinthians 2:6). “Perfect” here does not mean highly intellectural, it means spiritually mature. And when you are spiritually mature, you are humble enough to recognize that you need more wisdom!

“Today the truth appears as mere foolishness to the highly educated in this world!” Mr. Armstrong wrote in a letter to Church supporters on Nov. 29, 1946. “None but the fool says ‘there is no God.’ Yet surveys show most college graduates say it—educated fools!” In this same letter, he announced that he was establishing a college to support the work of the Church, later writing, “God showed me the time has come to establish an educational institution based on truth, on God’s revelation of truth, supplemented with those facts of natural and exact sciences which man has been able, himself, to discover—and all based on, and explained by, and in harmony with, the Bible.”

“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory” (verse 7). It’s a mystery to the natural human mind that has chosen to reject revelation from God. That’s exactly what almost every human mind has done since the very first human minds. But actual understanding, true education, the wisdom of God is open to those who believe and obey their Creator!

“[T]he foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25). Intellectuals find God’s revelation of what human beings are, what the laws of cause and effect are, what our purpose is, to be foolishness. Then they dedicate their lives to intellectually dishonest pursuits like pridefully pressuring others into believing there is no God!

“For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called” (verse 26). God has not called into His Church many professors, lawyers, judges, politicians or elites. That is because most of the “wise” turn away from God rather than ripping out their own vanity.

“But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are” (verse 27-28).

Even people in this world who believe in God and have developed an amazing amount of discipline, belief and character on their own human strength still have too much hidden self-righteousness for Him to work with in this life. So God calls those that the intellectuals and the religious both consider lowly. He gives these people His revealed truth. Then, if they choose to believe Him, yield to Him, and obey Him by putting that truth into action in their lives, they grow in faith, wisdom and even intellect! They understand what human beings are, their purpose and how to achieve it better than university presidents and heads of government! No organization changes people like the Church of God does.

“… Hath not God chosen the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them that love him?” (James 2:5). God calls the lowly of the lowly, then it is up to each person to yield his or her mind and life to God and His truth.

“The Almighty God is not impressed by the mighty of this world,” my father writes in his booklet on James. “Until they bring God into their lives, they amount to nothing. Their talents and riches are chaff. Should God’s servants be impressed with and awed by very talented people? If we don’t evaluate with God’s mind and with the depth of His thinking, it is easy to become too impressed with things that truly do not matter. God wants people who are rich in faith.”

An honest, humble, open, firm pursuit of the truth leads you straight to the Creator! It leads you straight into His Word. And it leads you straight into a time for choosing. Will you too cling to your own right, so called, to choose what is good and what is evil for yourself? Or will you surrender to God and let Him give you a true education?